Naturally. But all of that depends on your own definitions of "politeness" and "pontificating on ideal solutions".
Which is more important to the developer? Improving their product, or to insist on politically correct, hyper-sensitive US definitions of "politeness"? If political correctness is more important to a developer than the quality of their product, then the customers themselves might say, "Screw you!", you know.
So the developer should be careful when dealing with customer feedback and not discard it just because it doesn't conform to someone's idea of political correctness. Outright rudeness is repulsive to me, but straightforward talk about an app's deficiencies is not. The trouble with MobileRead is, that the two are being put on the same level. For example, I'm not aware of
ever having made a statement saying, or even implying, "Since this doesn't do xyz exactly like I want it, this product sux." There has never been even the slightest suggestion of this from me – not once. However, such an attitude is constantly being attributed to me by some voluble MobileRead posters who apparently see it as their duty to attack their fellow MobileRead posters if they don't conform to their idea of political correctness or "courtesy".
In dealing with user feedback, it's important for the developer to be able to separate grain from straw – useful feedback from bluster. Unfortunately, MobileRead makes that very difficult, because much of the "discussion" here is just one set of users launching personal attacks on other users, instead of discussing the app. Just look at this current thread: how much time and space have we already wasted in this thread by talking about our mutual relations and perceptions of "politeness", instead of about improving Marvin? That's meta-discussion, not discussion.
That is why it's so regrettable that Kris abandoned
Marvin's GitHub. GitHub is fantastic thanks to its strict organization of "one issue per thread". Thread hijackers and trolls from MobileRead have no chance to succeed on GitHub, because malignant personal attacks on other GitHub contributors, spamming all threads with the same "pet peeve", and other common MobileRead tactics, would be immediately noticeable there, and such posters would get banned instantly. (And, to be sure, the worst MobileRead trolls have been noticeably absent from Marvin's GitHub; they just wouldn't be allowed to spin their politically correct theories of "politeness" and
pontificate on them there.)
For these reasons, I hope Kris will – if Marvin's development in future is to continue in other ways than in these occasional cosmetic fixes – reconsider his decision to ditch GitHub, and will return to GitHub as
the place-to-go-to to manage user feedback on Marvin. Naturally, if Kris no longer has the time or inclination to develop Marvin in other-than-cosmetic-fixes ways, then his decision to abandon GitHub makes perfect sense.
And, unfortunately, this is really my impression of what happened. It appears to me that Marvin 3 was Kris's last-ditch effort to generate enough revenue to enable him to develop Marvin on a consistent basis. It appears, though, that Marvin 3 has not generated sufficient revenue, and so we're back to the post-Marvin 2 mode of "only cosmetic fixes once or twice a year".
